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Blog Tag: CMS

We often guide our clients in selecting the right Content Management System (CMS) for their digital platform. We ensure that the tool will form the right foundation to deliver an optimal user experience by assessing their system requirements, integration requirements, and budget.

However, we occasionally come across situations in which a CMS might not be the optimal approach. I’ve personally managed a number of CMS implementations with Sitecore and Drupal but have also guided projects where a CMS was not part of the implementation plan. What I’ve learned is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for clients.

Since the release of Sitecore 7.5, a new security feature has been included which may prohibit your rendered images from being properly resized, scaled, or otherwise transformed from its default Sitecore settings.

The news world has arguably taken one of the hardest hits from the digital revolution, seeing print publications eclipsed without a clear means to monetize digital channels. For many other industries, technology and digital innovation have amplified their preexisting businesses or they have been able to use digital as a tool to catapult themselves ahead of the pack.

So you’re a marketing executive and you recognize that your organization is at the point where a new Content Management System is needed. The selection process itself is much like anything in life, there is a lot of prep work to be done before you can actually get to the “good stuff,” like the actual evaluation and implementation.

Drupal is a robust and flexible content platform that makes it an obvious choice for education facilities when considering a redesign. Drupal is built to handle a large number of users with different permissions, support collaboration and organize large amounts of content with ease.

In making the case for an expensive software integration, short term vision is rarely going to bare out the costs. But midterm expenditures show, from a variety of viewpoints, the value and utility of an integration with the Adobe CQ5 platform. The coming updates (CQ5.5) on the venerable Adobe WCM/CMS will make an even more intuitive authoring environment that behaves more and more like the applications users utilize on a daily basis.

Load testing is a necessary and often overlooked tool in the optimizer’s arsenal, often relegated to a step after optimization has taken place. Indeed, at first blush, load testing might seem less of an analysis tool than pure validation. Ideally, if you have optimized well, then your Sitecore site will perform well under load, and vice-versa. If you haven’t, then a load test might tell you which of your components is the bottleneck – hardware (CPU, memory), networking (bandwidth, location), code, etc – but not necessarily why. Depending on circumstances, however, a load test can provide valuable insight into why a site is performing poorly.

The following blog post is part of a series on Sitecore optimization from the forthcoming NavigationArts’ Whitepaper entitled “Advanced Sitecore Performance Optimization”. You can view more blog posts in this series here.

With a deep background in Custom Application development, NavigationArts’ Senior Consultant, Karl Woods, approaches user experience (UX) consulting engagements with a keen focus on the client’s technology environment – specifically, where it stands, where it’s going, and how we can best align our practices with client needs. In my interview with Karl, I wanted to gain an overall understanding of how clients can better prepare for, and maximize the value from, a UX engagement.

Not every Sitecore environment is the same, and when it comes to deployment environments, the extreme variations in networking and access can interrupt your usual working process. Even the most robust of continuous integration systems that seamlessly test, compile and deploy code automatically – say a CruiseControl.NET server running well-tuned NANT scripts – can be “codeblocked” by managed environments like Citrix or restrictive VPN clients that often don’t play well with each other.

An interesting and pointed post over at The Real Story Group commented on Sitecore’s OMS tool the other day. While I certainly agree with the premise of the article, “Watch What WCM Customers Do, Not What Vendors Say,” as a customer and implementation partner of Sitecore, I thought I’d share my opinion based on the the real-world implementations and uses that we’re currently seeing in the market.

While no tool may be perfect, especially in its first iteration, the OMS (Online Marketing Suite) is usable and worth the effort out of the box. As one of the first implementation shops to undergo the OMS certification process offered by Sitecore, having a full understanding of both its strengths and weaknesses was helpful when explaining its virtues and faults to current and prospective clients. In the end, it seemed to be a logical and obvious extension to most implementation efforts and many clients are in full agreement.

For the last few months, I have been working with a spectacularly easy to use tool called Adobe CQ5, formerly Day CQ5. The beauty of CQ5 is how simple it is for a developer to create components that are easily used and reused by content editors, business analysts or other semi-technical staff members to create rich, consistent, professional looking web pages and web applications. My clients were spending 12-16 weeks to build out custom Spring based portals, but we built their first portal in less than 12 weeks using CQ5. Depending on the level of customization from one portal to the next, CQ5’s built in functionality allows for site replication in one to three weeks, and a new site with different colors and images takes just a couple of days to replicate, QA, and deliver to production.

So you are at the beginning stages of your new content management system (CMS) implementation project. You are finally going to get rid of the very painful, homegrown content management system you are currently using. Your head is filled with dreams of eliminating all of your manual processes and replacing them with fully automated integration points between your shiny new CMS and your entire hodgepodge of legacy systems.